CRITICISM

Beauregard, David N. “Shakespeare against the Skeptics: Nature and Grace in The Winter's Tale.” In Shakespeare's Last Plays: Essays in Literature and Politics, edited by Stephen W. Smith and Travis Curtright, pp. 53-72. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2002.

Argues that The Winter's Tale reveals Shakespeare's Roman Catholic religious perspective in that it follows the orthodox progression of penance through “the movements of contrition, confession, and satisfaction.”

Fawkner, H. W. “Negative Miracle.” In Shakespeare's Miracle Plays: Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale, pp. 57-118. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992.

Maintains that Shakespeare's dramatic treatment of the miraculous in The Winter's Tale is an artistic regression compared to his earlier romances, but acknowledges the effort as the playwright's willingness to risk failure in order to test the limits of his art.

Fortier, Mark. “Married with Children: The Winter's Tale and Social History; or, Infacticide in Earlier Seventeenth-Century England.” Modern Language Quarterly 57, no. 4 (December 1996): 579-603.

Discusses Shakespeare's depiction of family relations in The Winter's Tale, noting that this play “is his most systematic representation of everything wrong with family life.” The critic considers how modern social historians have sought to identify Jacobean cultural anxieties toward marriage, maternity, and sexuality through an examination of the play.

Hamilton, Sharon. “Daughters Who Forgive and Heal: Marina (Pericles), Perdita (The Winter's Tale), and Cordelia (King Lear).” In Shakespeare's Daughters, pp. 151-77. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2003.

Views Perdita as a fundamentally “two-dimensional” paragon of “virtue and optimism” who assists in Leontes's transformation from jealous tyrant to contrite husband and father.

Hardman, C. B. “Shakespeare's Winter's Tale and the Stuart Golden Age.” Review of English Studies 45, no. 178 (May 1994): 221-29.

Contends that The Winter's Tale contains an implicit political critique of contemporary propaganda which propogated the notion that James's I ascension to the throne signified the emergence of an ideal Golden Age in England.

Jordan, Constance. “The Winter's Tale.” In Shakespeare's Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances, pp. 107-46. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Posits that Shakespeare utilized pastoral conventions in The Winter's Tale to express to his audience the benevolent conditions by which a monarch might inculcate a productive commonwealth and benignly pass on political authority to the next generation.

Mazzola, Elizabeth. “‘Slippery Wives’ and Other Missing Persons: Disappearing Acts in The Winter's Tale.” Women's Studies 24, no. 3 (January 1995): 219-27.

Considers the relationship between feminine autonomy and the women characters' acts of disappearing from the patriarchal system in The Winter's Tale.

Newcomb, Lori Humphrey. “Material Alteration: Re-Commodifying Dorastus and Fawnia and The Winter's Tale, 1623-1843.” In Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England, pp. 131-207. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Explores how the “re-commodification”—or the recreating and retailing—of the Pandosto and The Winter's Tale stories reflects an increasingly pluralistic British readership from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries.

Nichols, Mary P. “Tragedy and Comedy in Shakespeare's Poetic Vision in The Winter's Tale.” In Shakespeare's Last Plays: Essays in Literature and Politics, edited by Stephen W. Smith and Travis Curtright, pp. 137-55. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2002.

Maintains that the contrary acts of tragic suffering and comic laughter in The Winter's Tale reflect Shakespeare's artistic preoccupation with how these divisions “complement each other and enrich human life.”

Sandy, Amelia Zurcher. “Untimely Monuments: Stoicism, History, and the Problem of Utility in The Winter's Tale and Pericles.” ELH 70, no. 4 (winter 2003): 903-27.

Analyzes the generic implications of a perceived connection between the romance tradition and the emerging Renaissance preoccupation with history in The Winter's Tale and Pericles.

Shannon, Laurie. “Friendship's Offices: True Speech and Artificial Bodies in The Winter's Tale.” In Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts, pp. 185-222. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Examines the ambiguous relationship between friendship and polity in The Winter's Tale, noting that Leontes's and Polixenes's amity is emblematic of a proscribed Renaissance “craft” of making and maintaining friends in both the private and the public spheres.

Snyder, Susan. “Mamillius and Gender Polarization in The Winter's Tale.” Shakespeare Quarterly 50, no. 1 (spring 1999): 1-8.

Argues that Leontes prematurely removes Mamillius from his boyhood environment of feminine nurturing and forces him to assume a masculine identity. Snyder concludes that Mamillius's exposure to this ruthless gender polarization causes his untimely death.

Taylor, Paul. “Sher Shines in a Tale Wonderfully Told.” Independent (7 January 1999): 5.

Commends Gregory Doran's 1999 Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Winter's Tale, singling out Antony Sher's “wonderfully rich and complex characterisation” of Leontes.

Tucker, Kenneth. “Matthew Warchus' The Winter's Tale.” Shakespeare Newsletter 52, no. 3 (fall 2002): 81.

Assesses Matthew Warchus's 2002 Americanized Royal Shakespeare Company staging of The Winter's Tale, particularly the thematic contrast of Sicilia—a film noir high society—and Bohemia—an Appalachian hoe-down. The critic concludes that the over-exuberant Bohemia scenes unintentionally made the concluding statue scene in Sicilia anticlimactic.

Vanita, Ruth. “Mariological Memory in The Winter's Tale and Henry VIII.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 40, no. 2 (spring 2000): 311-37.

Asserts that Shakespeare manipulated his Jacobean audience's collective memory of Marian mythology and Henry VIII's wives and daughters in both The Winter's Tale and Henry VIII to lament the replacement of the traditional matriarchy with the early modern patriarchy.